The Aquitaine Progression by Robert Ludlum

Delavane and his people.”
    “Why did they think you were a part of them?”
    The old man paused. He looked briefly away at the shimmering Aegean, then back at Converse. “Because
that
man thought it was logical. Thirty years ago I took off a uniform, trading it for the Harris tweeds and unkempt hair of a university professor. Few of my colleagues could understand, for, you see, I was one of the elite, perhaps a later, American version of Erich Leifhelm—a brigadier general at thirty-eight, and the Joint Chiefs were conceivably my next assignment. But where the collapse of Berlin and the
Götterdämmerung
in the bunker had one effect on Leifhelm, the evacuation of Korea and the disembowelment of Panmunjom had another effect on me. I saw only the waste, not the cause I once saw—only the futility where once there’d been sound reasons. I saw death, Mr. Converse, not heroic death against animalistic hordes, or on a Spanish afternoon with the crowds shouting ‘
Olé
,’ but just plain death. Ugly death, shattering death. And I knew I could no longer be a part of those strategies that called for it.… Had I been qualified in belief, I might have become a priest.”
    “But your colleagues who couldn’t understand,” said Joel, mesmerized by Beale’s words, words that brought back so much of his own past. “They thought it was something else?”
    “Of course they did. I’d been praised in evaluation reports by the holy MacArthur himself. I even had a label: the Red Fox of Inchon—my hair was red then. My commands were marked by decisive moves and countermoves, all reasonably well thought out and swiftly executed. And then one day, south of Chunchon, I was given an order to take three adjacent hills that comprised dead high ground—vantage points that served no strategic purpose—and I radioed back that it was useless real estate, that whatever casualties we sustained were not worth it I asked for clarification, a field officer’s way of saying ‘You’re crazy, why should I?’ The reply came in something less than fifteen minutes, ‘Because it’s there, General.’ That was all. ‘Because it’s there.’ A symbolic point was to be made for someone’s benefit or someone else’s macho news briefing in Seoul.… I took the hills, and I alsowasted the lives of over three hundred men—and for my efforts I was awarded another cluster of the Distinguished Service Cross.”
    “Is that when you quit?”
    “Oh, Lord no, I was too confused, but inside, my head was boiling. The end came, and I watched Panmunjom, and was finally sent home, all manner of extraordinary expectations to be considered my just rewards.… However, a minor advancement was denied me for a very good reason: I didn’t speak the language in a sensitive European post. By then my head had exploded; I used the rebuke and I took my cue. I resigned quietly and went my way.”
    It was Joel’s turn to pause and study the old man in the night light. “I’ve never heard of you,” he said finally. “Why haven’t I ever heard of you?”
    “You didn’t recognize the names on the two lower lists, either, did you? ‘Who are the Americans?’ you said. ‘The names don’t mean anything to me.’ Those were your words, Mr. Converse.”
    “They weren’t young decorated generals—heroes—in a war.”
    “Oh, but several
were
,” interrupted Beale swiftly, “in several wars. They had their fleeting moments in the sun, and then they were forgotten, the moments only remembered by them, relived by them. Constantly.”
    “That sounds like an apology for them.”
    “Of course it is! You think I have no feelings for them? For men like Chaim Abrahms, Bertholdier, even Leifhelm? We call upon these men when the barricades are down, we extol them for acts beyond our abilities.…”
    “
You
were capable. You performed those acts.”
    “You’re right and that’s why I
understand
them. When the barricades are rebuilt, we consign them to oblivion.